Americans high school squad motivated for late-season push

The Great Falls Americans high school hockey team gathers around assistant captain Braxton Lorenz, a senior at Great Falls High, for a pep talk during practice in the Great Falls Ice Plex on Tuesday.(Photo11: TRIBUNE PHOTO/JULIA MOSS)Buy Photo

The Great Falls Americans high school hockey team would rather strive to surprise than sit back and settle.

That’s why the final four games on their schedule are so important to third-year mentor Aaron Quick and his players.

Great Falls, 7-8-1 in league play this season, has accumulated 15 points overall during the 2016-17 season. The top six teams in the Montana Amateur Hockey Association make it to Whitefish in March, considered the more competitive of the two state tournaments.

If the season ended today, the Americans would be in the field but as one of the final teams.

“If we make it to A state, it’s more of an accomplishment because I’d rather be the worst team at A state than the best team at B state,” forward Jamison McLain said. “When you go and win 7-0, it’s kind of fun scoring and all, but I’d rather try to go and put up a battle against the best teams in the state.”

In his third season, Quick has seen a steady increase of skaters on his team as the Great Falls community moves further away from the two-plus year period in the mid-2000s when it didn’t have any ice to skate on.

From nine players to 11 to 16, Quick’s roster has nearly doubled in his three years behind the bench. This year’s squad, which includes seven new faces, features players from Great Falls High, C.M. Russell High, Great Falls Central, Foothills Christian and Simms.

“The kids that are coming up have had ice here the whole time that they’ve been playing,” Quick said. “We have a large freshman class and a large sophomore class. I think we only have three seniors and a handful of juniors. But everyone else is freshmen and sophomores.”

One of those rookies is Cameron Barnes, who attends Great Falls High and is currently in his first season of competitive hockey.

Barnes said he had only skated once in his life before this season.

“They’ve been super supportive in helping me in practice and all that,” Barnes said.

Barnes’ uncle encouraged him to start playing more, he said, and then his family got a street hockey net. He started shooting and practicing and before long, Barnes was at the team’s camp, hooked.

“It’s been pretty hard because I barely knew how to skate at the beginning,” Barnes said. “And in our first game, I got laid out pretty big.”

Also in that game, Quick remembers a sequence on a faceoff where Barnes didn’t know where to line up. It’s part of the learning process for a team as wide-ranging experience-wise as the Americans and for novice like Barnes, whom the rest of the team credits as being one of its hardest workers.

“He’s improved a lot,” Quick said. “He’s a very positive kid, and he works his butt off the whole time.”

To a man, the team says their net minders do too. They will tell you that they have the best two goalies in the state in senior Colton Rasmussen and Cameron McIntosh, only a sophomore.

“They keep us in a lot of close games,” Braxton Lorenz said. “They work hard every day at practice and they come and they prove it at games.”

In league games, AJ Folds, a junior at C.M. Russell High who kicked for the Rustlers football team in the fall, leads the team with 26 points, tallying a team-best 15 goals to go along with 11 assists.

Lorenz (9G, 10A), McLain (6G, 10A) and Jacob Van Every (2G, 14A) are also at the forefront of the team’s success. Folds and Lorenz are the assist captains, while McLain and Van Every are the captains.

It’s been a volatile season for the high school club, but it has produced glimpses of promise.

“We kind of started off rough,” said McLain, a junior at Simms High School. “But as we started to get to know each other and play more games, we started to get a feel for each other, started to get to know each other more and get our game down. We haven’t had the most winning season, but we’ve been playing hard.”

That improving work ethic, they hope, will bring them to the six-team tournament in Whitefish at the beginning of March. The bottom four outfits of the 10-game league – made up of teams from Missoula, Billings, Flathead, Butte, Helena, Bozeman, Havre, Glasgow and Miles City – advance to what is called B state in Havre.

The Americans have four games – not including the Casey Cup in early February – left on their schedule before the state tournament, against teams toward the bottom of the league in Havre and Glasgow. In 2016, the Americans advanced to the final six. With a mere nine skaters, they finished fourth.

McLain, a football player for the Simms Tigers, is in his third season playing for the Americans. His older brother, Kelby, was a senior on the hockey team when Jamison was a rookie.

“I love playing for this team,” McLain said. “It all kind of started my freshman year. I played hockey with my brother that year. I never actually had that big of a love for the sport until that year. It just of built off that, especially since now I’m a captain. I get to pass on my love for the game to these younger kids.”

A senior at Great Falls High, Braxton Lorenz is one of the most talented players on the team.

He played for the Great Falls Americans Junior A Tier III team earlier this season, totaling three points in 15 games, before a December 31 deadline forced him to pick between one and the other. His goal, he said, is to play for head coach Jeff Heimel and the Americans full-time next season and eventually find a home at the collegiate level.

While the speed and skill of the game is hardly recognizable when comparing the two teams, Lorenz tries to remain patient, understanding that many of his teammates are in the infancy stages of learning the game.

“It’s a big difference,” Lorenz said. “The high school kids, they are still developing. I feel like the junior kids are already developed and have more skill. Here, we are just trying to develop skill.”

Players look to Lorenz for guidance, so he doesn’t take his role on the team lightly. He’s always looking for ways to not only better himself as player but also do anything he can to help his teammates take that next step.

“We have younger kids,” said Lorenz, a defenseman. “But in a few years, if they keep working hard, we’ll be a solid high school team. We’ll be up in the top of the state.”